There are many different protocols that are found in today's Data Center and Cloud network environments. In many cases these protocols coexist and share the same communications networks. The more ubiquitous of the communications network, the Local Area Network (LAN), is usually based on the Ethernet protocol. Over the Ethernet protocol, servers communicate with other servers and servers communicate with storage devices or storage arrays. The server to storage device connections usually have specific performance requirements. These requirements can be characterized by metrics that can include latency, bandwidth, lossless-ness and multiple paths to the same destination. Server to storage device networks are usually called storage networks. The converging or merging the computer and storage networks has created additional complexity in the management, control, and data switching areas.
In parallel with the innovations around converging the computer and storage networks, there have also been a trend to virtualize servers, i.e., consolidate a corporation's many underutilized servers onto fewer more utilized servers. The server virtualization trend has many advantages, including more utilization of existing under utilized servers, lower equipment space, power, and cooling requirements since there are fewer servers. This trend results in fewer and higher utilized servers which have changed the traffic characteristics of the Local Area Network that interconnects them. The traffic requirements which used to be flowing from Internet to Server have changed to an any-to-any server flow. This migration in traffic patterns has produced a trend to “flatten” LANs, i.e., consolidate the normally three layers (core, distribution, and access) of switches commonly found in a Data Center to two layers (core and access). In parallel with this physical flattening trend is the trend towards utilizing layer 2 forwarding methods to keep the network in a single broadcast domain, which, helps support any-to-any connection requirements of virtualized servers and their hypervisors. New link level protocols have been defined to accelerate the ability for any-to-any server based virtual machine communications. Many of these new link level protocols need new switch hardware and new ways to manage the resulting network.
FIG. 1 illustrates an Internet Simple Name Server and the connection to iSCSI devices. The Ethernet switch 130 is coupled to an iSNS Server 120 and two iSCSI devices, Device A 100 and Device B 101. Both iSCSI Devices 100 101 communicate with the iSNS Server 120 through the iSNS protocol (iSNSP) 110 111. The iSNSP allows the attached iSCSI devices to discover the existence of each other and how to communicate with them. There are many issues with the implementation of an iSNS controller that is interoperable with the current iSCSI devices.
What is needed is a simpler way to converge compute and storage networks in a satiable and less complex method than with current methods. Both simpler methods need to be easily managed, scalable, and interoperable. Accomplishing this would accelerate the compute and network convergence trend and accelerate the flattening of the LAN to more easily attain the benefits of visualization, convergence, and consolidation.